Still Running Off at the Keyboard

I'M STILL TRYING TO FIGURE THIS ONE OUT !

An old issue of "Latin Mass Magazine" contained an article on the four temperaments--Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic, Melancholy. If I remember correctly they were credited to St. Thomas Aquinas. Unfortunately I don't have the magazine, and the article doesn't appear to be online. In any case the four temperaments are discussed at Catholic Online:

The four temperaments were originally proposed by Hippocrates -- the "father of medical science" -- 350 years before the birth of Christ. Hippocrates used them to explain differences in personality, based on the predominant bodily fluid; hence the rather unappealing names: choleric, sanguine, melancholic and phlegmatic....

Many of the great saints, such as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis de Sales, have written about the temperaments, and great spiritual theologians, such as the late Reverend Adolphe Tanquerey -- author of the spiritual classic "The Spiritual Life" -- and contemporary theologian, Dominican Father Jordan Aumann, all write about temperament and the spiritual life.

Understanding one's temperament gives us a clue about where to begin in our quest for holiness.

That was pretty much the thrust of the article in "Latin Mass Magazine".

Frances Yates writes about the four temperaments in THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHY IN THE ELIZABETHAN AGE:

According to the Galenic psychology, dominant through the Middle Ages, the four humours or temperaments into which all men could be classified were the sanguine, the choleric, the phlegmatic, and the melancholoic....

The theory locked man's psychology into the cosmos, for the four humours correspond to four elements and four planets, as follows:

Sanguine - Air - Jupiter
Choleric - Fire - Mars
Phlegmatic - Water - Moon
Melancholy - Earth - Saturn

The theory was bound up with astrology. If Saturn dominated in a horoscope, the person concerned would be inclined to melancholy; if Jupiter, the outlook would be more hopeful, and so on. (p. 59-60)

She goes on to associate the four temperaments with Neoplatonism.

I suppose it could be meaningful to all of the above, but this sort of overlap always bothers me. In any case, the four temperaments play a significant role in Waldorf School curriculum. Waldorf, of course, is the work of Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner who was head of the German Theosophical Society until he broke off relations with them in order to start his own philosophy which combined Theosophy with Christianity.

I knew about Steiner's use of the four temperaments when I read the "Latin Mass Magazine" article, and so was rather shocked that it was being promoted in Catholic circles. That shock remains as I see its role in Neoplatonism as described by Yates.

And as I said, I'm still trying to figure this out.